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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26808847">Whumptober 2020 quick responses</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/woodenwashbucket/pseuds/woodenwashbucket'>woodenwashbucket</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Whumptober 2020 [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Batman - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Bad things happen to the Batfam but they'll get through it I don't do hopeless endings, Blood Loss, Bombs, Chapter 11 has profanity and does get to the comfort part, Chapter 4 has profanity and doesn't get to the comfort part, Chapter 7 also doesn't get to the comfort part, Death, Failing to save everyone, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Momentary existential crisis, Natural Disasters, Nausea, No editing we die like mne, Stabbing, Timeline What Timeline, Whumptober, Whumptober 2020, Writing Exercise, disorientation</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 08:41:55</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>13,917</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26808847</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/woodenwashbucket/pseuds/woodenwashbucket</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>I'm writing off-the-cuff responses to the Whumptober 2020 prompts and any I think are moderately decent I'll toss on here.<br/>Tags will be updated as chapters are added.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Batfamily - Relationship</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Whumptober 2020 [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1993780</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>116</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Prompt No. 3 My Way or the Highway: Manhandled / Forced to their Knees / Held at Gunpoint</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I'm using Whumptober to try to get myself writing every day again.<br/>I'll do my best to keep the tags updated, but if I miss something that I ought to tag please let me know so I can fix it!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Father’s fingers dug into Damian’s shoulder. He barely felt it.</p><p>“Yes, that’s right, Gotham!”</p><p>They’d come to the shopping district to buy a birthday present for Brown.</p><p>“This is a live, yes, live broadcast!”</p><p>Father’s phone had rung, and he had answered it, just as they were passing a sports bar with a few televisions facing the street.</p><p>“Many of you have suffered from this man’s actions over the years, have you not?”</p><p>Father had stopped dead, face going still and blank, the kind of still and blank that could cover any emotion of any severity. Damian’s blood had run cold. Father had lowered the phone slowly, as patrons and employees in the bar started yelling and pointing at their phones, then scrambling to change the channel on the televisions.</p><p>“Well, then, I’m sure you’ll all enjoy this!”</p><p>A crowd had gathered. Was still gathering.</p><p>“Ladies and gentlemen of Gotham-“</p><p>The picture on the screen was not disguised. The location was, in fact, immediately recognizable to Damian and undoubtedly to Father, and probably to some of the people in the crowd. The top of the skyscraper office building known locally as “The Mirror” for its aggressively one-way glass and polished aluminum skin. The Wayne building could be seen in the background, two blocks away.</p><p>“-for your viewing pleasure-“</p><p>If Father wasn’t moving, it could only be because of some information in the phone call.</p><p>“-and undoubted satisfaction-“</p><p>Damian could hardly breathe. To be stuck here, in an ever-thickening crowd that hemmed them in (<em>not safe, not safe</em>, his upbringing hissed, but for once it was only a background concern), when on the screen in front of them-</p><p>“-the execution-“</p><p>Bloody as he was, it took three men to force him to his knees. At the edge of the shot, a news helicopter hovered into view, then veered away when one of the men on the roof lifted a rocket launcher to his shoulder.</p><p>“-of the Red Hood!”</p><p>Damian couldn’t look away. In his periphery, he could see that Father wasn’t looking away either.</p><p>Todd said something, though the picture was far too small for Damian to read his lips, and the man who’d been declaiming to the camera pistol-whipped him.</p><p>Father was stone.</p><p>Damian was ice.</p><p>If they weren’t leaving, if they weren’t vaulting over the useless, pathetic crowd around them and breaking all laws of man and physics to get the nineteen blocks that separated them from the Mirror, it could only be because Father knew something that Damian didn’t.</p><p>Only the two men holding Todd’s arms kept him from falling to the rooftop. He slowly turned back to the man in front of him. He must have said something, because the man leaned in.</p><p>And then jumped back with a yell, wiping blood off his face.</p><p>Todd laughed. It was a broken, gasping sound, but it was his laugh, and as the man pressed the gun to Todd’s forehead, Damian thought that wasn’t the worst last sound to hear his brother make.</p><p>The screens went black.</p><p>Damian couldn’t breathe.</p><p>The crowd made noises of irritation and disappointment and all the other useless, idiotic, <em>unacceptable</em> sentiments they might have at being denied the chance to see Damian’s brother die.</p><p>Father’s hand closed on his wrist, and Damian blinked at the knife in his hand. Father took it from him. Damian did not resist. His neck felt oddly stiff as he turned to meet his eyes, grating like ill-kept machinery.</p><p>Father picked Damian up and suddenly Damian felt less like machinery and more like a rag doll.</p><p>“It wasn’t live,” Father whispered in his ear. “It wasn’t live, Alfred told me on the phone.”</p><p>They were moving. Damian realized vaguely that he had closed his eyes.</p><p>“There was a one minute delay,” Father continued. He had Damian pinned to his chest, and Damian’s toes bounced off his thighs as he walked. Damian couldn’t seem to care. “The others were already on their way there. Oracle cut the broadcast as fast as she could.”</p><p>Father was stone. Perhaps that was why he didn’t seem to notice how Damian’s toes hit him, or how Damian’s chin was digging into his shoulder, or how Damian’s breathing was getting faster, and faster, and faster.</p><p>Father put him down into the car. Damian wasn’t sure when they had reached the car. Father buckled him in and moved back, then stopped.</p><p>Damian blinked at how his fingers were gripped so tight around a fold of Father’s sleeve, even when all the rest of Damian was still rag-doll limp, lolling against the backrest. Father looked at him a long moment, and then climbed over him to get to the driver’s seat, and leaned back over him to close the passenger door. He did not start the car.</p><p>Damian was ice. That was why his chest felt too stiff to take a full breath. That was why he was cold. That was why he had done nothing. He had done nothing.</p><p>Father had his arms braced on the steering wheel and was looking at his phone. The screen was blank. And no, Father wasn’t looking at his phone, he was looking through it. Seeing what? A warehouse in pieces? A body in a coffin? A costume in a case?</p><p>Neither of them jumped when the phone rang. Stone and ice were not capable of such a thing.</p><p>Father answered and hit the button for speakerphone.</p><p>“We have him.” Drake’s voice was ragged. “He’s alive, he’s stable.”</p><p>“Barely,” Cain’s voice added softly.</p><p>The noise in the background was indicative of a large, echoing space, which was appropriate because Damian seemed to be floating.</p><p>Father made a choked noise.</p><p>“We’re at the Bunker,” Drake said. “Get here. Just. Come here.”</p><p>“Yes,” Father whispered, and then, louder, “Yes. On our way.”</p><p>Damian didn’t feel the lurch of the car or hear the noise of the engine. He was floating very far away from all of it, except somehow he could feel that his skin was hot, uncomfortably so. He would try to squirm away from it, but he couldn’t, because he was floating.</p><p>Father picked him up again.</p><p>They were in an elevator.</p><p>The Bunker beneath the Wayne building yanked Damian loose from the helium balloon weightlessness that had gently floated him away from himself, because he was Robin, here.</p><p>He was Robin, and Batman set him on his feet, and they both rushed on silent, skillful feet to the medical cot in the alcove across the way.</p><p>Batman reached the cot before him, but it was Father again who sobbed his brother’s name and grabbed the hand that lifted to greet him.</p><p>Robin sidled up to the head of the cot on the other side, quickly assessing Todd’s injuries. He itched to rip aside the sheet, to shove Cain out of the way and see what she was suturing, to pull the bandage off of Todd’s head to see what it was hiding, because Robin needed information. Part of Robin’s training was to assess injuries so that was what he could do, he needed to do something because he had seen his brother on his knees with a gun to his head and done <em>nothing</em>.</p><p>“Here,” Drake said. Robin turned only so far as he could keep Todd (whispering something to Father) in his peripheral vision. Drake handed him a neatly-written medical assessment sheet.</p><p>Todd’s injuries.</p><p>Drake was seated, with an icepack strapped to his shin and a not-quite-scabbed-over split lip. Robin looked him over.</p><p>“Just these,” Drake promised. “And Cass and Steph don’t have anything. Steph’s making food upstairs, Alfred’s calling Dick. O’s got cleanup covered.”</p><p>Robin nodded, and turned to the sheet.</p><p>Two broken ribs, a concussion, a major laceration down the thigh, three broken toes, a hairline fracture of the cheekbone, and a glancing gunshot along the top of the shoulder. And undoubtedly innumerable cuts, scrapes, and bruises.</p><p>Robin looked back up at Drake.</p><p>“O told me when the broadcast cut off,” Drake said. “I’m sorry.”</p><p>“Unlike most things I cannot see how it was in any way your fault, Drake.”</p><p>It rolled off his tongue, automatic, and Damian noted that it was the first thing he’d said since Father’s phone rang outside the bar, and that his throat hurt, and that he was crying.</p><p>Drake took the paper out of his hands and Cain pulled him gently back to the cot, and Father moved back just far enough for Damian to squish in front of him, and Todd gingerly lifted his hand out of Father’s and interlaced his fingers with Damian’s.</p><p>“Hey, baby bat.”</p><p>“You’re not allowed to die,” Damian whispered, and Todd laughed. It was softer, and if anything even more broken and gasping, but it was much, much better than his laugh on the rooftop.</p><p>And better still, Damian would get to hear it again.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. No. 5 Where Do You Think You’re Going? On the Run / Failed Escape / Rescue</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The whump is more implied here.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The teenage boy in a t-shirt and jeans slightly too shabby to be unremarkable lounged against the side of the train station, eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. If anyone had been paying enough attention, they would have been able to tell he was tracking everyone who walked near, but he was counting on no one doing that. After several minutes, a similarly-aged and similarly-dressed girl came out of the train station and handed him a ticket.</p>
<p>“Almost three and a half hours till it gets here,” she murmured. He nodded.</p>
<p>“Wait inside?” he asked. They were speaking English, unlike the people who wandered by or the people inside the station.</p>
<p>She shook her head. “Not a lot of good exits.”</p>
<p>Both of them, had they taken their sunglasses off, would have looked exhausted. Even with the glasses on, both were obviously not in tip-top shape. It fit with their clothes.</p>
<p>The girl eyed a restaurant across the street. The boy shook his head slightly. She looked at him, swallowed, and nodded.</p>
<p>The girl’s hair was bundled up under a worn baseball cap. One strand of it stuck to her forehead, and she tucked it up under impatiently.</p>
<p>“Shade,” she said, and nodded toward an alley off the other side of the street a few dozen yards down from the station. The boy nodded. But rather than move right away, both lingered. Anyone paying enough attention – the right kind of attention – would have been able to tell they were scanning the street and buildings.</p>
<p>They were counting on no one doing that.</p>
<p>Finally, they pushed away from the wall together and sauntered across the street, each keeping an eye on the people who walked by unnoticing. When they reached the cool of the alley both leaned against the wall.</p>
<p>The boy took a deep breath, held it, and let it out slowly. The girl looked at him sharply. He waved a hand to dismiss it.</p>
<p>“It’s the same,” he said.</p>
<p>“You need water,” she said.</p>
<p>“It’s fine.”</p>
<p>“I need water.”</p>
<p>He raised an eyebrow at her. She scowled.</p>
<p>“On the train,” he said.</p>
<p>She considered him for a moment.</p>
<p>“Hell with this,” she said, and started to walk past him out of the alley. He grabbed her wrist.</p>
<p>“Don’t,” he snapped, then winced and leaned back against the wall.</p>
<p>“We need to be in better condition than this,” she said. “It’s still three hours.”</p>
<p>“I’m too shaky, and you have three broken fingers,” he pointed out. “We can’t afford to get caught pickpocketing.”</p>
<p>“Maybe I’ll just ask for some water,” she said. “Like a normal person.”</p>
<p>“There’re security cams in the restaurant and the-“</p>
<p>“I know,” she snapped. He was breathing heavily. “I’ll be careful. Hey,” she said, when he started to slide down the wall. “Hey. Talk to me.”</p>
<p>“Just dizzy,” he whispered.</p>
<p>“I’m getting water, and I’m doing it without getting on camera,” she said. “You. Wait. Here.”</p>
<p>He just took a long, slow breath, and swallowed. His face was drawn.</p>
<p>The girl walked out of the alley, paused, and walked out of his sight off to the left. He slid down to sit on the ground, and pulled a small rock out of his pocket to hold it concealed in his hand. Behind his sunglasses, his eyes flicked back and forth to watch the mouth of the alley and the shadows at its far end, and up to scan the rooflines of the buildings that formed it.</p>
<p>He squeezed the rock suddenly, as his jaw clenched, and he swallowed over and over until he relaxed again.</p>
<p>A flicker of motion made him look up, and he barely caught the water bottle that dropped from the roof as the girl leaped the alley, trailed a few seconds later by someone who barely made the leap and was yelling furiously.</p>
<p>The boy twisted the lid off the water bottle and drank almost half of it before hauling himself to his feet. He hesitated, looking up, then at the mouth of the alley.</p>
<p>“Damn it, Steph,” he whispered, and centered himself with a long breath before strolling out of the alley, looking casual as anything, and wandering down the street in the direction the girl had been running.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. No. 6 Please…. “Get it Out” / No More / “Stop, please”</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Dick!Robin and Babs!Batgirl</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Batgirl’s hands fluttered and shook. She waved them helplessly around the handle of the knife.</p><p>“Don’t take it out,” Robin reminded her breathlessly. He was on hands and knees and was winded after racing to her rescue.</p><p>“I know,” she managed. “I. I know.”</p><p>“Don’t take it out,” he said again, and she thought it was probably to remind himself this time.</p><p>“Right,” she agreed again.</p><p>She <em>wanted </em>to take it out. It was a thin, almost absurdly flimsy-looking blade, and only the fact that it was also short had kept it from reaching her femoral artery. The thin knife had slid between sections of her armor and was stuck firmly in her upper thigh.</p><p>It hurt.</p><p>“It hurts,” she whimpered, and was furious at herself.</p><p>“I know,” Robin said, with the utter lack of scorn he saved for the times when he really did know, not just that what she said was true but how she felt about having said it. The jackass.</p><p>“Have you been stabbed?” she asked, in the same helpless high pitch.</p><p>“Yeah.” He nodded and sat next to her. He had his breath back. He reached out, and for a moment his hand wavered like hers were. Then he grabbed one of her hands and held it hard enough to distract.</p><p>‘It hurts’ didn’t even begin to cover it.</p><p>Batgirl had been hurt before – cuts and bruises and a graze from a bullet and a very nasty burn and some electric shocks that had given her nightmares – but she’d never had to sit and wait with a foreign object <em>in her body</em>. She hated it. She could feel the knife, not just the pain and the pressure and the nauseating flare when she moved her leg wrong and the damaged muscles tightened around the blade, no, she could <em>feel it in the wound</em>. It felt <em>wrong</em>.</p><p>“I want it out,” she gasped. “Please, get it out.”</p><p>“I can’t. You know we can’t.”</p><p>She sobbed once, no tears, just an uncontrolled breath, and Robin squeezed her hand tighter.</p><p>“I want it <em>out</em>,” she wailed.</p><p>“I know,” Robin said. She looked at him, and it was clear he really did know. He looked sympathetic, pained, worried, grim, and a little sick. “You can feel it, right? And it has to go. It’s wrong.”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“We can’t take it out.”</p><p>“Right,” she made herself say. “Not safe.”</p><p>“Super not safe,” he agreed.</p><p>“How many times?” she asked. She was squeezing his hand back now.</p><p>“Uh…”</p><p>“Have you been stabbed?”</p><p>“Three, like this sort of thing,” he said. “And two other times I’ve had big stuff stuck in me I had to wait for a doctor to cut out.”</p><p>Batgirl’s free hand came up toward the knife handle, and Robin caught it before either of them could find out what she was about to do.</p><p>“Please tell me it gets easier to deal with,” she said. He grinned.</p><p>“What, not going to retire after this? The great Batgirl, there and gone in two years, leaving only legends and terrified criminals in her wake?”</p><p>“I don’t think they were very scared,” she said. She eyed the unconscious men on the ground around them. “Not as scared as they should have been.”</p><p>“That’s for sure,” he said, as though she hadn’t been losing when he’d crashed down into the alley like he was the one who was vengeance. She looked, but couldn’t see anything except sincerity in his face.</p><p>She didn’t even want the sincerity. She wanted the knife out of her leg.</p><p>He moved his hand to keep her arms in a more comfortable position and it shifted her weight enough that her leg moved. Less than an inch it moved, and it was enough to make the pain flare so badly she whined through clenched teeth. He didn’t say anything, no platitudes or reassurances, just squeezed her hands harder.</p><p>She wanted the knife out of her leg. It shouldn’t be there. It was wrong.</p><p>“Hey,” he said. She looked back up at him, and saw he was more worried. “B’s on his way for pickup, and then doc’ll get that out fast as anything, ok?”</p><p>He squeezed her hands again.</p><p>She wanted to pull the knife out of her leg.</p><p>She squeezed back.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. No. 8 Where Did Everybody Go? “Don’t Say Goodbye” / Abandoned / Isolation</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>A look at grief.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Dick doesn’t go to Jason’s grave right away. First he cries until he’s numb, goes to the Manor and gets angry immediately, screams at Bruce for a while, probably upsets Alfred, and then gets drunk and goes back to his apartment and sleeps it off.</p><p>He wakes up, eats breakfast, deliberately leaves his phone and his comm and his Titans comm and his backup phone on the kitchen table in his apartment, and <em>then</em> he goes to see Jason’s grave.</p><p>Dick has never been very formal at graves, which is a distressing thing to be able to say with complete honesty when you’re only in your early twenties, but it is what it is. He isn’t formal when he visits his parents, or Bruce’s parents, or any of the friends and heroes he knows who’ve died. He’s not going to be formal for his little brother.</p><p>“Hey,” he starts, and sits down with his back against the headstone.</p><p>It’s a beautiful headstone.</p><p>“I got your favorite,” he says, and pulls a pint of ice cream and a spoon out of the plastic bag he brought. “I was gonna take you out for ice cream again when I got back, you know.” He pries off the lid and digs in. “Kinda feel like I should scoop some of this out on the ground, but I also kinda feel like that would be offensive.” He eats a few more spoonfuls, nods, and drops the next few spoonfuls on top of the grave. “You’d like it,” he tells the headstone. “Fuck everyone else.”</p><p>He sits and eats until the ice cream has melted enough at the edges to dump the rest out onto the ground.</p><p>“I almost wish someone would yell at me about it. Give me an excuse.” He stuffs the carton and spoon back in the bag and shifts so he can watch the ice cream melt, leaning his head against the stone. “Not a good idea though. I’d lose it, and hit them too hard, and fuck but I don’t want to knock someone out on your grave, Jason.”</p><p>There are house finches in the nearest tree. Dick wonders for a moment if seeing a robin would make him start crying again.</p><p>“This isn’t right, Jason,” he whispers. “This isn’t what was supposed to happen. I was supposed to take you out for ice cream and keep you with me longer than we agreed, and Bruce would get pissed, and you’d stop me and him yelling at each other, and then things would be just a little bit better. And then we’d do it again. And eventually Bruce would stop being an asshole to me, and I’d stop losing my temper at him every time he phrased something wrong, and maybe if there was a miracle it would all be fixed in time for me to be there to help with your college applications and Bruce could tease me about dropping out, and it would just be teasing. And then you’d know that no matter what you decided about college it would be ok in the end. And before that we would do train surfing again, and I would snap at you when you followed me on patrol, and you’d snap at me when I gave you hints you didn’t ask for, and.” He sighs.</p><p>“Do you know why I never let you say goodbye to me?” he asks, watching the ice cream melt into the sod. “I always say ‘see you later,’ and I made you say it too. Do you know why?”</p><p>The house finches sing, just far enough away to be indistinct.</p><p>“It’s so you have to stick around to do it,” Dick says, voice breaking. “It’s so you have to stick around to keep the promise. You promised to see me later, little wing. When I took off last time, I said ‘see you later,’ and you yelled ‘see you later, dickface’ out your window. You were supposed to see me later.” He starts crying again, helplessly. He curls up against the side of his brother’s headstone, and whispers it again, as though it makes any difference at all. “You were supposed to see me later.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. No. 10 They Look So Pretty When They Bleed Blood Loss / Internal Bleeding / Trail of Blood</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>This one managed to have an actual beginning, middle, and end, which I am celebrating.<br/>I know I say 'no editing' in the tags but this REALLY wasn't edited.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>One lucky hit. That was all it ever took, but tonight in particular it was just one lucky hit. He hadn’t been distracted, or overwhelmed, or already injured, and then rather than glancing off armor or sticking into a bit of superficial muscle, the blade had slid between armor plates, gone through the cut-resistant fabric at the perfect angle, and hit something larger than most blood vessels. He knew immediately it was worse than it felt, because there was so much blood leaking out of the suit that the henchman who’d got him stopped, staring, long enough for Batman to knock him out.</p><p>“Batman!” Robin yelled, horrified, and Batman called back, “Stay focused, I’m fine.”</p><p>He didn’t have time to deal with it just then, because Two-Face was getting away and Robin was still dealing with a few henchmen himself, keeping them away from the hostages. Batman took a second to test his side, confirming that the stab wound wasn’t deep at all – maybe a half-inch of blade had gone into him. He scowled at the steady flow of blood running down his side and leg, and went after Two-Face.</p><p> </p><p>Robin finally managed to knock one of the goons down hard enough the guy stayed down, and after that it was increasingly easy to deal with one after the other. As soon as the last of them was secured, and the ones Batman had dealt with earlier cuffed as well, he turned to get the hostages out.</p><p>“Thank you, thank you,” the first man gasped when Robin pulled the gag out of his mouth. “I don’t know how to-“</p><p>“Don’t worry about it!” Robin said cheerfully. “Gotta protect the people of Gotham! Just sit tight and I’ll get everyone loose lickety-split.”</p><p>As he worked his way down the line, he kept an ear out for Batman. Or, if everything had gone horribly wrong, for Two-Face coming back. Honestly, he was getting kind of nervous that B had been gone so long. His voice had been perfectly firm when he said he was fine, and yeah, blood always looked like a lot, especially out in the field, but still. Robin was allowed to be nervous about this sort of thing, B was terrible about hiding how bad things could be. He kept up the cheer for the civilians, though.</p><p>“Alright, folks, if you could kindly walk this way, the GCPD will be along shortly.”</p><p>“What if they wake up?” one woman asked, pointing a shaking finger at the incapacitated goons.</p><p>Robin yelled a frustrated internal yell and gave her his best comfort-the-victims grin. “I’ll take care of ‘em. I’m waiting with you.”</p><p>The woman relaxed immediately, which made Robin feel heroic and also like a tool for being frustrated. He knew this was the right call. Stay with the civilians, keep them safe and feeling safe until the cops and EMTs showed up, then go find Batman. It was a guiding principle of dealing with hostage situation aftermath. He knew it was the right call, and Batman was probably totally fine. He could deal with a light stabbing with both hands tied behind his back – Robin had literally seen him do it. Everything would be fine.</p><p>So why was Robin’s blood running cold?</p><p> </p><p>Batman swung around a corner and ducked just in time to avoid a wrench that flew out of the darkness at him. He flung a batarang at the most likely location of the thrower, but heard only a faint clink and then running footsteps. He set off after them, ignoring the slight unsteadiness he had developed. It was fine. He was fine.</p><p>There was more light around the next corner, and he could see a door at the far end of the hallway swing shut. He dashed to it, threw it open while standing back in case of ambush, and when nothing jumped out slid cautiously out of the building. He glanced around, but saw no movement or anything out of place.</p><p>His scan happened to turn him back toward the building just as the door was closing, and he was startled to see a line of left footprints down the hallway. He looked down and saw that far from stopping, the flow of blood out of the small cut in the suit had increased. It painted a stripe down his side, down his leg, and coated the bottom of his boot.</p><p>As though waiting for him to notice, the unsteadiness surged. Batman clamped a hand over his side, and was startled again to feel the tell-tale squish of a thoroughly blood-soaked underlayer. He’d hoped that maybe the outer suit had stuck to the edges of the wound – it happened occasionally, and made any bleeding seem much worse. But if there was this much blood outside, on top of whatever was soaking into his clothes, that was a problem.</p><p>A faint noise made him reflexively dodge before he even processed the sound. A gunshot sounded behind him and a bullet ricocheted off the alley wall. Two-Face snarled and dodged the batarang Batman sent at him in turn. He tried to take off running, but Batman flung a bola and tangled him up. Two-Face lost the revolver as he fell, but managed to scramble to it and get it raised before Batman got to him. Batman leaped, trusting his armor and his assessment of Two-Face’s aim, and grunted when the bullet hit him square in the chest plate. He’d have bruised ribs.</p><p>He twisted the gun out of Two-Face’s hands before the man could get a second shot, and twisted his hands behind his back.</p><p>Then he had to stop to catch his breath. He was dizzy.</p><p>Two-Face, always observant, sneered.</p><p>“What’s the matter, Bats?” he asked. “One of my guys give you something to worry about?”</p><p>“I’m fine, Harvey,” Batman growled. “You’re headed back to Arkham, you know.”</p><p>“Oh, I know. For now.” The man twisted on the ground to look Batman in the face with his good eye. “That doesn’t look fine, though.” His voice had gone quieter, smoother. More Harvey Dent than Two-Face, though Batman couldn’t really trust either of them.</p><p>“It will be,” he said, with as little affect as possible. “And you don’t need to worry about it.”</p><p>Batman collected himself. It was harder than it should have been, and he started to worry that he’d misgauged the depth of the wound. Surely something so superficial would bleed this much? But he knew how serious blood loss felt, and this was it.</p><p>“Oh, I wouldn’t say I’m worried.” It was back to Two-Face now. “Enjoying it, maybe, but not worried.”</p><p>“Hmm,” Batman grunted, and finished tying Two-Face up. He’d leave him there. He was easy to find, and Batman needed to get back to Robin. Not that Robin wasn’t competent, but all it took was one lucky hit, and Batman didn’t feel like trusting that wouldn’t happen twice in one night.</p><p>He slid back inside the building and set off retracing his steps back to the room they’d started the fight in. Now that he was out of sight, he let himself slow for a second. Just to catch his breath again.</p><p>He bumped against the wall before he realized he’d veered to the side.</p><p>The alarm from that cleared his head enough to realize he’d lost more blood than was safe. He tried to raise a hand to his comm, but it was overly heavy and impossible to lift. The momentary adrenalin was receding. In its wake, Batman felt sick and faint. His field of vision was narrowing. He slid down the wall, leaving a smear of blood that stood out vivid against the unpainted sheetrock. Sitting, he managed to hoist his arm onto his knee, and slump until he could reach his ear.</p><p>“Robin,” he said on the comm. His voice sounded clumsy. “I could use some help, chum.”</p><p> </p><p>It was a good thing the cops and the ambulances were visible down the street when the call came over Robin’s comm, because he would absolutely have up and left the civilians in the dust without so much as a by-your-leave when he heard B’s voice sounding like <em>that</em>. It felt like someone had run ice down his spine and dropped the floor out from under him.</p><p>“There’s the cavalry, folks!” He managed to sound bright-cheery-Boy-Wonder-golly-gee for that one sentence, and was gone before any of the civilians could say anything. He raced back into the room where the hostages had been held and straight past all the goons to the door he’d noted Batman leave through.</p><p>He was <em>expecting</em> to have to search around, and was maybe possibly panicking a little about what could happen to Batman if he took too long, and then he saw the footprints. They started as just a faint curved line, and he only noticed them because he was a trained observer. Then he noticed that they got darker, and longer, until it was one whole edge of a shoe clearly marked in red-brown. Then they spread across the tread, and Batman’s boots might have been custom and in-no-database but Robin could recognize the tread just like he could recognize the track of the Batmobile’s tires.</p><p>He didn’t stop, when he fully realized how much blood B must be losing to leave tracks like that. He didn’t stumble, and he didn’t slow, because those things were not things he could afford to do. Batman wasn’t answering the comm, Batman had left a trail of blood as he chased a villain, Batman could be <em>dead</em> somewhere because Robin had left him alone with no one to guard his back. He took a corner fast enough he had to twist and spring off the wall to avoid slamming into it, and noticed that there were a few splashes, in addition to the footprints. Through a dark room, and another, around another corner into a lit hallway and there was Batman, near the far end, sprawled motionless on the floor with a smear of red up the wall beside him and a pool of red spreading out from under him.</p><p>Robin didn’t have any breath left to yell, he just slid to a stop by Batman’s head and pressed fingers to his neck. He almost collapsed when he felt a pulse, but he pulled himself together.</p><p>“A, this is Robin calling for extraction. Big guy’s down and we need medical.”</p><p>“On my way, Master Robin.”</p><p>Just hearing Alfred’s voice kicked Robin’s thought process back into something like order, and he carefully rolled Batman over to see his injured side.</p><p>“This’d be a lot easier if you were smaller,” he complained to his unconscious partner. He tried for teasing but it didn’t sound convincing even to him. “Or if I was bigger but we both know that’s not going to happen any time soon.” He found the stab wound and threw his whole body weight into putting pressure on it. The squish of blood under the suit made him shiver.</p><p>“Please be ok, B,” he whispered, suddenly afraid. “This is stupid, this can’t- You can’t die, ok? Please be ok.”</p><p>Blood kept leaking out, though slowly, between Robin’s fingers. It oozed over his gloves, slowly coating them in red, and he bit his lip to keep from crying.</p><p>He leaned even harder onto the wound, making his arms shake, and kept his blurry eyes on Batman’s too-pale-even-for-him face under the cowl. Alfred would be there soon to help him get B into the car, and everything would be ok. Everything would be ok.</p><p>It had to be.</p><p> </p><p>He woke up slowly. The sound told him Batcave, the feel told him medical cot, the smell told him someone had just finished disinfecting something.</p><p>The hand in his told him Dick was asleep in a chair next to the cot.</p><p>Bruce blinked up at the IV stand. Blood, saline, both were expected but there were empty bags behind the full ones. Against common practice in a hospital, but Bruce liked to know at a glance what he’d gotten, and Dick had regrettably had enough occasions to express a preference that Bruce knew he’d picked up the habit as well. The bags hanging on the stand told Bruce that, almost certainly, one of two things had happened: he’d been unconscious for days, or he’d lost so much blood he’d gone into hypovolemic shock.</p><p>How had he bled so much? If the wound had actually been that severe he’d have stopped to bandage it at least, before going after Two-Face. He’d thought it had only barely gone into the muscle.</p><p>That could be put aside, for now.</p><p>“Dick,” he said gently. As he expected, Dick snapped awake and scowled at him.</p><p>“You are the world’s greatest dimwit,” Dick snapped. “You are an arcade prize locket that doesn’t close right and the loop breaks off as soon as you try to actually thread it onto something. You’re a crossword puzzle with four misspellings in the solution. You’re a piece of toast that got torn up because someone tried to spread cold butter on it and then the toast got cold before the butter could melt. You’re a leaky rain boot. You’re an inflatable swimming pool, but one of the really crappy ones that’s way smaller than it looks on the packaging and also the seams leak and the air valve is in a stupid place so you can’t reinflate it without dumping all the water out and also it’s an ugly color.”</p><p>When he stopped to think of another one, Bruce seized the chance. “I’m sorry I scared you, chum.”</p><p>Dick glared at him. “I’m not scared. Who said I was scared? I was embarrassed, that’s what. My partner got stabbed and almost bled out in a hallway because he couldn’t be bothered to put any pressure on it, that’s embarrassing. Reflects poorly on the whole team.”</p><p>“I think your leadership training isn’t quite complete yet,” Bruce said. “I’m told insulting your underlings is counterproductive.”</p><p>“Hmph,” Dick snorted. He crossed his arms and glared harder.</p><p>“I thought it was superficial,” Bruce apologized. “You know I try not to die on you, chum.”</p><p>“It wasn’t exactly deep,” Dick admitted. “It just hit an artery anyway.”</p><p>Bruce pushed the sheet down to find the short line of stitches low on his left side.</p><p>“Epigastric,” he guessed.</p><p>“Artery and vein,” Dick confirmed. “And boy oh boy wasn’t that fun when we pulled the suit off you and Alfie went to take a look and we got arterial spray right across both our faces.”</p><p>Bruce winced.</p><p>“You <em>should</em> be sorry,” Dick agreed. “And Alfred said to tell you as soon as you woke up that you’re a nincompoop and if you hadn’t gone out before you’d completely recovered from last week you might not have passed out from this but he’s given up on trying to get you to behave rationally and he washes his hands of the matter.”</p><p>“Does he?” Bruce asked, amused.</p><p>“Probably not,” Dick said. “He said he’d bring down sandwiches and cookies and hot cocoa and he didn’t even say you didn’t get any so I think you scared him too but not so bad.”</p><p>“He was just glad he didn’t have to do abdominal surgery in an alley again,” Bruce suggested.</p><p>“And that it was only a single-digit number of stitches this time,” agreed Dick.</p><p>They sat in silence for a bit. Dick looked down.</p><p>“Dick,” Bruce said gently. “I really am sorry. If I’d realized, I would have stopped and taken care of it, even if it meant Two-Face getting away. I’m not going to leave you if I can help it.”</p><p>Dick wiped his face without looking up.</p><p>“Come here, chum.”</p><p>Dick rolled up onto the cot and curled up facing away from Bruce. Bruce pulled Dick into a hug, careful not to tug his IV lines, and sighed.</p><p>“I suppose I have only myself to blame if you eat all the cookies and don’t leave me any, huh?”</p><p>Dick nodded.</p><p>“Woe is me,” Bruce said in his most intimidating Batman growl. “All the cookies have vanished into a bottomless pit.” Dick giggled soggily. “Thank you for taking care of me, partner,” said Bruce, shifting back into his natural voice. “Teaming up with you was the best idea I ever had.”</p><p>“It was my idea,” Dick said loftily, and surreptitiously wiped his face again.</p><p>“Was not.”</p><p>“Was too.”</p><p>“I remember it differently.”</p><p>“Well so do I.”</p><p>“Hmm.”</p><p>“Hmm yourself.”</p><p>“I mean it,” Bruce whispered, under the sound of the elevator bringing Alfred down. “Thank you for saving me.”</p><p>“Lucky I was there,” Dick whispered back.</p><p>“Not luck,” Bruce told him. “Just you.”</p>
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<a name="section0006"><h2>6. No. 11 Psych 101 Defiance / Struggling / Crying</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>This one's all about the comfort of someone who knows you really well and knows what you need when your head is in a bad place, folks!</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When it becomes clear everyone’s going to live, and recover just fine, and, in fact, will potentially even be hobbling around under their own power the next day or the day after, Dick leaves the Manor and heads to Oracle’s clocktower.</p><p>Usually, he can stick around. Usually he <em>wants</em> to stick around, usually he doesn’t even want to leave the Cave until everyone is out of medical cots and in their own beds upstairs, but today he couldn’t even if he wanted to. Today, he was trapped away from the action while his family fought and bled and almost died, and he can’t stay in the Cave or the Manor for one more second once he’s sure everything is going to be ok.</p><p>He also can’t go back to his apartment. The thought of being alone is terrifying, because Dick Grayson has something called ‘self-awareness’ and he is in an absolutely <em>hideous</em> headspace, and if he is alone he knows something bad will happen. Will he decide it’s better to stay away, and thereby hurt everyone’s feelings and make himself miserable? Will he stay up for another twelve hours training until he injures himself? Will he start an overly ambitious and inevitably doomed project to end all crime in Bludhaven in a desperate attempt to not feel like a worthless failure? Will he do something new but equally stupid and unnecessary? Who knows! Not Dick!</p><p>And he really, really can’t leave the city. That way lies turning up uninvited at a friend’s house, taking offence to something not actually offensive, replying way too viciously to be teasing, and getting into a completely absurd fight that nevertheless hurts everyone involved.</p><p>So he does what he always does when he’s self-aware enough to see this sort of thing coming and isn’t in the middle of a fight with Babs: he goes to the clocktower.</p><p>Babs is asleep when he gets there. He slides in through a window, using the Nightwing-shaped holes in the security system that she changes often enough that they’re both more or less comfortable it isn’t too dangerous. Right now that means identifying the spots on the roof and wall that don’t have live alarms, via a code exploit she taught him, then getting to a window using those spots which is, frankly, a challenge even for him, and then getting the window open when the lock on it has three traps for unwary lockpickers, which she told him to watch out for. And doing all of it silently, so the audio alarms don’t trip. He touches down lightly in the hallway, and unprompted recites a code to let the alarm system know it’s him: content of the code and voice print checked by isolated systems that use different microphones. Once the window is relocked behind him, he can relax.</p><p>“I’m in,” he whispers, because even in this headspace he kind of thinks it’s funny. And maybe Babs will look over the security log of his entry, to make sure everything’s working, and she’ll think it’s funny too.</p><p>Then he goes to the big main room and collapses on the couch and cries until he passes out from sheer exhaustion.</p><p>He wakes up when Babs puts a mug of coffee on the side table.</p><p>“You look awful,” she tells him.</p><p>“You look like a vision of unearthly beauty,” he tells her.</p><p>“Flatter me all you like, I’m still not giving you theme music over the comms again until you give back the sweatshirt.” She rolls away to her main workstation and calls up the holographic displays with a flick of her fingers.</p><p>Dick stares into the coffee for a while. It’s lukewarm when he chugs it down. Babs is reporting the findings of one of her data-mining deep dives into a corporation’s books to someone when Dick finally runs out of the ability to sit still and rolls off the couch. He slept in his costume, which is disgusting and he would regret it immensely if he were in a better headspace, but now is just kind of a background fact. He walks on his hands over to Babs’ side, shifts to balancing on one hand, and uses the other to finger-spell ‘shower’ in her peripheral vision. She nods at him without stopping her steady recitation, and he does silent cartwheels out of the room.</p><p>In the shower, he starts crying again. It’s not even really about what happened, this most recent thing that happened, the way things are always happening. It’s more than that, bigger than that, and his evening of anxious waiting and anticipated grief is just what tipped him over the edge. He can’t scrub away the feeling of re-setting someone’s dislocated elbow, and that wasn’t even from last night.</p><p>Last night was broken bones, not dislocated ones.</p><p>Last night was shrapnel wounds, an hour spent picking bits of concrete and sheetrock and wood and metal and plastic out of Jason’s back while Cass sat in front of him, holding his focus to distract him from the pain because when Jason was that rattled he refused narcotics and sedatives because feeling the pain hurt much less than feeling out of control.</p><p>Last night was Damian with defiant red-rimmed eyes, so out of it he hid his tears reflexively and couldn’t relax enough to be treated unless he had a knife in his hand.</p><p>Last night was Alfred looking old and Bruce looking haunted, but that was every time, that was every time no matter who was hurt, that was every time whether Dick was there or not.</p><p>He can’t even remember whose elbow he’s remembering re-setting.</p><p>When he gets out of the shower, feeling at least not physically gross, his nose is running, which is just typical. He lies down on the couch and waits.</p><p>Babs throws a Robin plushie at his head and he catches it and throws it back. He makes himself throw it where she can catch it, even though the vicious, angry side of his awful headspace makes him kind of want to throw it just out of her reach.</p><p>It helps that she’d absolutely know where it was coming from if he did, and would just bean him with something hard in return. Babs’s tolerance for Dick’s bullshit has always been zero, and that lets him get a much better handle on it.</p><p>“Make lunch,” she tells him, in between organizing some information for Fire and running ops for a mission someone’s got going somewhere in the GMT+5:30 time zone. He doesn’t recognize the code names.</p><p>He makes them sandwiches and mimes offering to feed Babs’ to her, which results in a silent sparring match where he tries to get the sandwich in her mouth while she talks and she fends him off. It would make him laugh if he were in a different headspace, and if anyone else were there he’d fake a grin but it’s Babs. Babs knows him too well for that.</p><p>When she’s done running ops she pulls the headset off and brings her sandwich over and asks him to transfer her from her chair to the couch. It’s a kind thing for her to do. It’s an affirmation of trust and it’s letting him feel useful and because it’s them it’s also unambiguous permission for him to cling to her and hide his face in her shoulder.</p><p>“It’ll be ok,” she tells him. She eats her sandwich and he slowly starts crying into her shoulder and when she’s done eating she hugs him and he finally sobs properly and gets snot all over her shirt and neck. “It’ll be ok.”</p><p>“I wasn’t there,” he gasps, finally. “I wasn’t <em>there</em>, I didn’t know what was happening, I thought-“</p><p>“I know,” she whispers, and she does. She knows what last night was like for him, and she knows what he thought, and she knows that this is just the last straw because things have just been shit in Dick’s head for a few weeks.</p><p>He doesn’t ask her how she can stand not being in the field, because he knows the answer and it would hurt her to ask it yet again. He doesn’t explain that he wished last night that his hands would shake because then it could be someone else’s job to dig into his little brother’s skin and at the same time he would have punched anyone who suggested that he step back and let someone else handle it. He doesn’t tell her that he has a eulogy written for every one of them, including her. He doesn’t ask her to pull up medical records to check whose elbow his hands can feel come back together.</p><p>He just cries, and she holds him, and when he’s silent again she asks him to come with her to the Manor to check on everyone, and he does, because he wants to, and he can.</p>
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<a name="section0007"><h2>7. No. 19 Broken Hearts Grief / Mourning Loved One / Survivor’s Guilt</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Tim has lost a lot of people. Kon is the latest.</p>
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    <p>There is grief and there is grief. That’s something Tim knows. It’s no good comparing, because it’s not even comparing apples and oranges, it’s comparing apples and the concept of gravity. You can make a connection between them if you try, but that doesn’t mean they’re comparable.</p><p>Why is it that today, Tim can look back on his mom with love and fondness and calm and maybe even a little bit of objectivity about what kind of parent she was, when two days ago he sat in the shower for forty-five minutes sobbing about how she’ll never eat breakfast with him again? Because grief is like that. There’s no answer other than that.</p><p>Why is it that sometimes thinking about the hostages he failed to save that one time in his first month as Robin hurts more than thinking about kneeling in his father’s blood, and sometimes the hostages are more motivation than pain? Because that’s how it goes.</p><p>Why is it that when Steph was dead, or, well, when they thought she was, Tim could wall her off in his mind, put her on a shelf or a pedestal or a list, and just keep going, but now, when Kon is dead, he can’t do the same for him? Because there is grief and there is grief.</p><p>Dick feels guilty about it, which is stupid, because if Dick hadn’t gotten a team in place the world would have ended, and also because if there was one thing Kon knew his whole short life it was that he was willing to die a hero.</p><p>Dick feels guilty about it, which is good, because if he didn’t Tim might hurt him. Badly.</p><p>Steph didn’t know Kon very well. Tim thinks their relationship mostly consisted of giving each other Significant Looks behind Tim’s back when Tim fell asleep somewhere absurd, or figured out how to change the plan to minimize risk to everyone else and forgot to minimize the risk for himself, or quoted a really old meme, on the rare occasions they were in the same place. Steph doesn’t get to know Kon, now.</p><p>Weird how Tim’s two best friends don’t know each other. Didn’t. Again, it’s didn’t, because Steph was gone-not-dead and Tim did this with Kon, once, cried so hard he was practically screaming while Kon held him together. After that, Tim had put Steph in a glass case in his mind and she never left it until she showed up in front of him.</p><p>It’s been three weeks, and Tim is crying on Steph’s mom’s couch, so hard he’s practically screaming, and Steph is holding him together.</p><p>He thinks, somewhere beyond the grief that’s making his throat ache, that he should tell Steph he did this for her, too. He should tell Steph that Bruce shut down after she died, that Dick disappeared, and that Tim fled Gotham and he and Cass clung to each other. Someone should tell Steph at some point, he thinks, that when she died we broke.</p><p>He can’t breathe through his nose, and that’s what finally pulls him out of the abyss of grief that’s making his chest try to cave in. He tries to breathe while he’s got his mouth closed, and can’t, and it makes a weird noise, and then he and Steph are laughing.</p><p>He misses Kon. Kon’s laugh was good.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” Steph says, tears running down her face, and Tim’s not sure if they were there before or if they’re just from laughing. “It just, it sounded like a duck and I-“</p><p>Tim gasps, laughing harder. “A duck!” he manages to choke out.</p><p>“Quack!” Steph sputters. Tim makes a honking noise.</p><p>Steph is laughing so hard she has to hold on to him, and they both end up falling off the couch.</p><p>After a few minutes of silence, Steph pulls him upright and hugs him almost hard enough to hurt. She opens her mouth – probably to ask if he wants something to eat – and he can’t deal with making decisions about food when Kon’s never going to throw popcorn at him again.</p><p>“Grief-stricken is a weird phrase,” Tim says. “I think it should be grief-drowned.”</p><p>“Always?” Steph asks, as though she doesn’t know the answer. Then again, she doesn’t know the answer nearly as well as Tim does. Maybe it’s a real question.</p><p>“No, not always,” Tim says. “There’s grief and then there’s grief.”</p>
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<a name="section0008"><h2>8. No. 25 I Think I’ll Just Collapse Right Here, Thanks Disorientation / Blurred Vision / Ringing Ears</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Nightwing has a bit of a time fighting Scarecrow. Fortunately, he has the best sister.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Scarecrow hoisted a jack-o-lantern over his head and threw it at Nightwing. He dodged, but didn’t bother to go far. He had a breathing filter in place, and it had worked against three fear gas bombs so far.</p><p>This jack-o-lantern, though, bounced off the wall and rolled back towards him as Scarecrow ran. Nightwing started after him, but hesitated. If it wasn’t a fear gas bomb, maybe it was important-</p><p>He was on the floor.</p><p>There was probably someone yelling on comms, because the explosion had definitely been audible from outside the building, but all he could hear was the ringing in his ears. He forced himself to his feet and leaned on a wall.</p><p>“Flashbang,” he said, in case his comm was still working. He couldn’t remember the layout of the room well enough to go after Scarecrow, not until he could see again. “Just a flashbang. Scarecrow ran.”</p><p>Nightwing absolutely hated being disoriented like this. His balance was one of the few things he really, truly loved about himself, and he hated when it was taken away even for a moment.</p><p>Trying to take a step away from the wall was a mistake. He wobbled and caught himself again. Some Flying Grayson.</p><p>Something else was off, more than just the disorientation and the ringing in his ears and the afterimage blinding him. Crap, he was so vulnerable. His filter mask wasn’t cracked, was it? He was getting nervous about how vulnerable he was, was that fear toxin getting to him or just the disorientation combined with an objective situation assessment?</p><p>He forced his breathing and heart rate into the normal range and did a careful inventory. One escrima stick was gone but the other had stayed in his hand. His filter mask felt fine and he didn’t smell anything off. His mask was intact, and his vision was starting to clear. His ears-</p><p>Ah. His comm was gone. It was probably on the floor somewhere. That was bad. That was really bad – no one knew his status and he wasn’t responding, and he couldn’t call for back up if Scarecrow came back or there were minions they’d missed on the way up.</p><p>The floor and wall wobbled a bit as he crouched. Nausea sloshed around in his head and his stomach, nausea and hating the loss of his balance. That was the real problem – he could fight blind, he could fight deaf, but without his balance he was a sitting duck.</p><p>He forced his breathing and heart rate back to normal again.</p><p>He cautiously let go of the wall to feel around on the floor, keeping his escrima up in guard, just in case.</p><p>His vision was clearing more quickly than his hearing, but he couldn’t see his comm yet. He searched methodically, scanning the room every few seconds for threats.</p><p>By the time his ears started to pick up the noise he made shifting around to search, he had lost control of his breathing again. He’d been out of contact too long. What if Scarecrow had gotten away? What if one of the others was hurt? What if they couldn’t find him?</p><p>He needed to calm down. He could do this. It would be fine.</p><p>He reached too far and lost his balance; fell to his knees and one hand.</p><p>He scrambled to standing, pressing his back against the wall. He couldn’t bear it, he needed his balance back. It wasn’t fear toxin, and it wasn’t objective situation assessment either. He just hated it. He hated it and it felt <em>wrong</em>. He wasn’t himself without his balance, how could he be himself when he couldn’t <em>stand</em> let alone fly?</p><p>Didn’t matter. He needed to find his comm and get back in contact.</p><p>He crouched again and started again, blinking tears out of clearing eyes.</p><p>Footsteps, quick, coming up the stairs to the door off to his left.</p><p>Nightwing grabbed a bit of trash to throw as a distraction with his free hand and turned, almost falling into the wall again. He set himself as ready as he could.</p><p>The dark shape that hurtled in through the door dodged easily and slid to a stop in front of him.</p><p>“Black Bat,” Nightwing sighed, relieved. She signed something, but his vision wasn’t that clear yet.</p><p>“Caught Scarecrow,” she said, loudly and slowly for him, and he nodded, relieved again. She tapped her ear in a large obvious gesture and spoke more softly.</p><p>Nightwing let himself put a hand to the wall for a moment, and then Cass was in front of him again, holding out his comm and his other escrima stick. He took them, but put the comm into a pocket. The yelling wouldn’t do his ears any good at this point.</p><p>Cass slid an arm around his waist and walked him over to a window, but he resisted. He couldn’t. Not when he couldn’t even stand, he couldn’t do it.</p><p>Cass watched him for a moment, and then squeezed him around the waist.</p><p>“Let me,” she said, slow and clear. “Brother. Let me.”</p><p>He didn’t want to but, well, no, he did. He did want to let her. Just for now. Just when he was still getting his balance back, just for now, he could let her be his balance.</p><p>Cass swung them both down to the ground. They landed just beside the Batmobile, and she herded him into the back seat before anyone noticed they’d come down.</p><p>“Wing!” Batgirl yelled when she saw him. “You’d better have a good explanation!”</p><p>“Nightwing, what are your injuries? Why were you off comms? What happened?”</p><p>“Nightwing, status report.”</p><p>Dick looked at Batgirl, Robin, and Batman crowding in behind Black Bat and curled into the seat.</p><p>“Later,” he said, and wrapped his arms around his head. Now that the afterimage and the ringing were fading, the headache was starting to come to the fore. “For now, I think I’ll just collapse right here, thanks.”</p><p>Cass said something to them, and he heard Damian tisk and Steph snort. He caught Cass’s hand as they all headed away.</p><p>“Hey,” he said. “Really. Thanks.”</p><p>She smiled, big and obvious so his blurry eyes could see it, and kissed his cheek.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. No. 27 Ok, Who Had Natural Disasters On Their 2020 Bingo Card? Earthquake / Extreme Weather / Power Outage</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Some aftermath in the manor kitchen after a very, very bad night and morning.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Dick made it to the kitchen first. He sat staring though the table until Alfred put a bowl of cereal in front of him.</p><p>“Eat, young sir.”</p><p>Dick didn’t reach for the spoon.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>“I’ve got you. I’ve got you.” Nightwing pulled the child up out of the hole in the floor as gently as he could. He had to grip her wrists tight enough to hurt, because she was slippery with blood. “Can you look at me? Is anyone else down there?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The girl looked at him with empty eyes.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Just Dad.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Nightwing set her down on a clear-ish spot of stable floor and turned back to the hole. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“You don’t have to,” she said. Her voice was empty, too. “He’s been dead for a few hours.”</em>
</p><p> </p><p>Jason was the next in, coming not from a bedroom but from the Cave. His entire left arm was wrapped in bandages.</p><p>“Some eggs, Master Jason?”</p><p>Jason sat at the table across from Dick and picked at the edge of the bandage.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>“I can get you out, just hold on!” he yelled to the man panicking in the overturned, half-submerged bus. “Just stay where you are!”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The man didn’t pay attention, or didn’t believe him, or maybe didn’t hear him at all. He scrambled over the seats towards the front of the bus and the smashed windshield. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“No, the current is too strong over there!” Red Hood tried to crawl under the concrete pillar that had collapsed onto the bus, knocking it into the river, but there was no space. Swearing, he smashed his hand through a window to unlatch it, slashing his arm on the jagged edge of the Plexiglas. By the time he made it inside the bus, the man was gone.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>Tim came in quietly. Alfred set more cereal on the table and started pouring coffee for them all.</p><p>“I’m heating the griddle for pancakes.”</p><p>Tim put his feet on the chair and curled around his knees.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Red Robin said calmly. “Everyone hold hands with the people next to you. I’m going to lead us out. We’ll go slowly, and I’ll keep talking the whole time. If anyone trips or needs to stop, just say something. If anyone loses their grip, just say something. Ok?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The huddle of people looked at him with fear, or anger, or numbness, or determination. He repeated himself, and eventually they linked hands. He checked that everyone was in one line before he took the hand of the woman in front and started off into the pitch-black tunnels. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>When they got out into the smoggy dawn light, rain still streaming down, they were short two people. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>Cass walked straight past all of them and wedged herself in the space between the top of the refrigerator and the shelf over it.</p><p>“Miss Cassandra, if you tell me what you would like, I will pass it up to you.”</p><p>Cass didn’t move.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Black Bat held up a hand to each group. The clouds blotted out the moonlight, and in this neighborhood there was no backup power for the streetlights. She was a shadow in a shadow, not enough of her to make a wall between the people who thought they’d been given a chance to hurt each other.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“This is between us and them,” yelled one. He waved a handgun. “You capes can stay out of the way!” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Leave, now,” snarled one from the other group. He shot at Black Bat, who dodged.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>That shot hit no one, but it started the shooting, and by the time Black Bat disarmed all of them, nearly half were dead, and everyone still alive was bleeding. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>Damian stomped to the seat next to Dick and sat with perfect posture, nose in the air. When Alfred set a plate of pancakes in front of him, he tutted.</p><p>“Either eat this or ask for something else, Master Damian.”</p><p>Damian did neither.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>“Just walk away,” Robin said. “No one has the resources to chase you right now, not even me. Just walk away.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The man who was standing looked down at the man on the ground, then back at Robin. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Don’t,” Robin warned. “If you kill him I will chase you. If you walk away, I will be busy getting him to safety and you will escape. Just walk away.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The man considered.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The building shuddered, and a loud crack heralded a structural failure. The floor tilted and slipped sideways, and Robin dove for the men. A bullet hit his cape, but he did not flinch. He grabbed the nearest wrist and fired a grapple line to the stable part of the building. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>When the dust settled, he hauled the one man he’d grabbed up to the intact floor. He couldn’t see where the other man had landed. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>Duke came in walking unevenly, one ankle in a brace. He sat at the corner of the kitchen table and fiddled with the edge of a napkin.</p><p>“Master Duke, pancakes? Coffee?”</p><p>Duke shifted his gaze from the napkin off into the middle distance.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>“Come on, I’ll catch you,” Signal called up to the people on the broken fire escape. “Just jump down one at a time.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He helped six of them land safely before the building cracked. He could see it would fall towards them, crushing the alley.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Go!” he yelled to the six on the ground. “All of you, jump, I’ll help you get out of the alley, but you have to come now!”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>There were too many to all climb over the railing at once. He made it out of the alley inside the cloud of debris, falling when a brick skittered across the ground and slammed into his ankle. All told, fourteen people ran or limped out of the alley. Signal didn’t know how many hadn’t made it. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>Bruce obviously hadn’t slept yet. He padded silently in wearing the leggings of the suit underlayer and a bandage across his torso.</p><p>“When did you get back?” Dick asked. His voice was almost gone from overuse.</p><p>“Half an hour ago,” he said. “We got the bridge unblocked and then I dropped Stephanie off at her mother’s apartment.”</p><p>“She’s ok?” Duke asked.</p><p>“She’s not significantly injured,” Bruce said, not quite answering the question.</p><p>He sat. Alfred put a plate of pancakes and eggs in front of him.</p><p>“Thank you, Alfred,” Bruce said, and made no move to eat. He looked around at his children instead.</p><p>“All of you did amazing work last night and this morning,” he finally said. “I am proud of all of you.”</p><p>No one met his eyes.</p><p>“It’s bad out there,” he continued. “And we can’t save everyone. But we did save who we could, and we will continue to do so.”</p><p>He looked at Dick.</p><p>“You evacuated an entire apartment building without injuries.”</p><p>Dick looked up, caught off guard. Bruce nodded, and turned to Jason.</p><p>“You blocked off the road to the collapsed riverbank before emergency services had even heard about it. With how heavy the rain was, the estimate is that more than fifty cars would have gone into the water.”</p><p>Jason met Dick’s eyes across the table.</p><p>“Tim, you told so many people about the evacuation coordination center on ninth that every student from Lincoln Middle School is back with their families already.”</p><p>Tim sat up straight. Bruce looked toward the refrigerator.</p><p>“After the evacuation of the women’s shelter, someone broke in and tried to get the location information for relocated survivors. You had taken all the files and computer drives and brought them to the coordinator. There was nothing there for the perpetrator to find.”</p><p>Cass slithered down to the floor and crept to Bruce’s side.</p><p>“Damian, you found a safe route out of a flooded neighborhood and cleared every house, including people’s pets.”</p><p>Damian’s shoulders relaxed. Bruce put a hand on Duke’s shoulder.</p><p>“You found and evacuated three different group squats in the old subway tunnels before the flooding reached them.”</p><p>Duke stopped fiddling with the napkin and squeezed Bruce’s hand in return.</p><p>“We can’t save everyone,” Bruce repeated softly. “But all of you have done incredible things, in the past and since the storm hit. You are all heroes, and I am proud of every one of you.”</p><p>Alfred set a new pot of coffee on the table.</p><p>“Eat,” Bruce ordered, and they all did.</p><p> </p><p>“Hey, B, did you tell Steph this stuff too?”</p><p>“…I have to go make a phone call.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. No. 28 Such Wow. Many Normal. Very Oops. Accidents / Hunting Season / Mugged</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>It was just an accident. But Damian fears no one will believe that, given how he's treated Drake in the past.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was an accident.</p><p>Damian stayed frozen at the top of the stairs and watched. Pennyworth had heard, and come to check up on them. He’d broken into a run when he saw Drake lying still on the floor.</p><p>“Master Timothy, can you hear me?”</p><p>Damian didn’t hear a reply, but some of the tension went out of Pennyworth’s shoulders, so he could presume Drake was alive, at least, and probably conscious. That was…important. Good. He saw Drake’s hand twitch and Pennyworth start to look up. Damian faded silently back from the bannister and, when he was firmly out of sight, ran for his room.</p><p>He shut and locked the door behind him, then latched the window. It would not stop anyone in the family for long, but it would at least give him some warning. Damian realized he was breathing hard and tried to calm, clenching his fists until his muscles ached to bring his focus in. It didn’t work. He squeezed himself into the space between his bed and desk, a spot that could not be seen from the window at any angle.</p><p>It had been an accident.</p><p>He could still feel the spot on his leg where Drake’s foot had hit, and he thumped it briskly with his fist to try to get the feeling out. Drake – out loud Damian would have said <em>even</em> Drake – should have been able to catch himself easily. Failing that, a fall down a flight of stairs was nothing for anyone trained as they were.</p><p>However, when Drake put a hand out to catch himself, it landed on one of the papers Damian had dropped, and the paper slid on the polished wood like it was greased. Drake had curled when he realized he was still falling, but he had apparently forgotten – as Damian had forgotten – that the baluster by the fourth step from the top was still loose, and when he hit it, it had popped free.</p><p>Even that should have been nothing. It should have been nothing, to fall less than the height of a flight of stairs onto marble floor, for one of them. Damian had lunged anyway, had just missed Drake’s sleeve, and then had watched Drake land on the broken baluster, which rolled out from under his foot.</p><p>An absurd sequence of events, worthy of one of Richard’s black-and-white comedies, except that Drake’s head had hit the floor hard enough to make a noise that froze Damian in place. A ridiculous collection of accidents. Just accidents. Damian hadn’t even tripped Drake on purpose, they’d been shoving each other in what had felt like camaraderie and one or both of them had stumbled on the edge of the carpet.</p><p>Ridiculous. Absurd.</p><p>Roughhousing, and Damian dropping the sketches he held, and a broken baluster, and even Damian had to admit it looked very much like Damian had tried to kill his brother again.</p><p>He wouldn’t blame them. He couldn’t, not when it might have been true a few months before. Not when he’d never apologized for the times he really had tried, not when he still ambushed Drake at least once per week – though never with lethal intent, anymore.</p><p>Damian wouldn’t blame them, when they blamed him.</p><p>But what would they do?</p><p>What was the punishment for attempted fratricide, when you had demonstrated you knew better?</p><p>Todd had been Pit-mad, when he tried to kill Drake, and it still took Drake’s insistence for Father and Richard to truly forgive him. Or so Damian had heard – who knew what had really happened, when Damian hadn’t been there to see it himself?</p><p>Richard had spent hours and days and months teaching Damian the way of things here, bringing him to the realization that attempting to kill Drake was wrong, and longer helping him control his fear and anger at the one person who could reasonably attempt to take Robin away from him. Father had talked with him as well, many times, after Drake brought him back. Both Father and Richard knew that Damian understood, now, had control of himself, now.</p><p>So what would they think, when they believed this was another attempt?</p><p>If he could talk to Drake, perhaps he could convince him that it had been an accident. After all, Drake knew what had happened, if Damian could just get him to believe that he hadn’t set it up on purpose then Drake would have to support him. It should be possible, Drake had heard him yell, seen him lunge in an attempt at rescue. If Drake believed him, Father and Richard and Pennyworth and everyone else would have to, wouldn’t they?</p><p>Unless-</p><p>Damian’s stomach twisted.</p><p>Unless it wasn’t <em>attempted</em> fratricide he was suspected of.</p><p>Damian hadn’t stayed to see if Drake was conscious. He hadn’t stayed to hear what, if anything, Pennyworth might say. He had seen Drake’s hand twitch but that meant only that he wasn’t dead already, it meant nothing for possible bleeding in the brain, it meant nothing for internal trauma, it meant nothing for all the myriad ways a short fall with a bad landing could kill. And here, in his room, Damian was too far from the front hall to hear what was happening.</p><p>Damian scrubbed his face of unwanted tears and wormed even further into his hiding space.</p><p>What would he do, if Drake died? He supposed it would only be fitting, to accomplish such a goal long after he had abandoned it, long after the thought of what he had done made him sick. It would only be what Damian deserved, really, if after he’d tried to kill a stranger on purpose he killed his brother by accident.</p><p>It was just an accident.</p><p>He should not panic. He should not wonder and dread without information. It was possible Drake was fine.</p><p>Damian shuddered at the memory of Drake going limp with the crack of his head hitting the floor. He scrubbed his face again, impatient and angry at his lack of control.</p><p>He should not have been playing. He should not have been enjoying their mock fight to the point he forgot his surroundings. He had been careless with himself, with his brother, with the trust he had earned, because he had been acting like a child. He had thought that he could not lose so much by happenstance.</p><p>Even if Drake lived, the slight retrograde amnesia often found in concussions would mean he would not know it had been an accident. He would suspect Damian had tried to kill him, and Damian could not blame him for that. It would be absurd, stupid for Damian to think he had earned enough trust that Drake would not suspect him. Damian would scorn anyone who thought a few good months acting like brothers ruled out another attempt at murder.</p><p>It was utterly unreasonable for Damian to be heartbroken.</p><p>It was completely idiotic for Damian to be hiding from what he feared was happening outside his room.</p><p>The fear for Drake’s life, though, that he could allow himself. The fear of losing a brother – that was right. Even with all Damian had done, he could allow himself that.</p><p> </p><p>Damian didn’t know how long he hid before Richard knocked on his door.</p><p>“Dames? You’re in there, right?” Richard’s voice was gentle.</p><p>Damian did not reply. He froze at the sound, the thrill of adrenalin shooting up his back and up his scalp, making his eyes go wide and his heart race. If he replied, Richard would tell him what had happened, and he did not want to know. He did not want to find out what this accident had cost him. He wanted to stay suspended, painful though anticipation and fear were. Here, in this small space, no one and nothing could touch him.</p><p>But he owed Drake. He owed him more than he could ever pay, more than Drake would ever claim – or perhaps, had ever claimed. Damian knew the truth of that, and so he had to ask for the truth of this. To do otherwise, to continue to hide, was unacceptable.</p><p>“Dames?”</p><p>“Yes,” he croaked.</p><p>“May I come in?”</p><p>Richard sounded careful. Was he wary? Did he think Damian had only <em>started </em>with Drake, that Damian would attack him next?</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>The door was locked, but of course Richard had it open quickly anyway.</p><p>“Hey, woah, Dami, hey, are you ok?”</p><p>“I am not injured.”</p><p>Richard took Damian’s hands and pulled him up, gently, to sit on his bed.</p><p>“Tim’s going to be ok.” Richard pulled Damian into a hug and Damian, confused, did not resist. Richard was kind to a fault, but surely this was too much for an attempted murderer, even if Drake was alive.</p><p>“It,” Damian stuttered. “It was just a-“ To his horror and shame, he broke off, crying.</p><p>“It was an accident, Little D, it’s ok. It’s going to be ok. Hey, it’ll be ok.”</p><p>“You-“ Damian croaked. He scrubbed his face yet again. “How do you know?”</p><p>Richard smiled under worried, caring eyes.</p><p>“What else could it have been? Besides,” and his smile spread upwards, “the first thing Tim told us when he woke up was ‘it was an accident.’”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. No. 30 Now Where Did That Come From? Wound Reveal / Ignoring an Injury / Internal Organ Injury</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Jason isn't always the most observant.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Well that was refreshing,” Red Hood said brightly. He rolled onto his back with a wet squelch.</p><p>“You need to be more careful,” Batman growled. “If I hadn’t been there-“</p><p>“Yes, yes, the looming spectre of a second violent death haunts my every footstep – or slip, in this case – and it is only brought nearer by my refusal to adhere to Bat levels of preparation, caution, and paranoia, just as my first death was.” Red Hood winced. That last part had actually gone too far, even for him, and he didn’t need to look to know Batman looked wounded. He debated for a second. “Sorry. And for falling in. Did Robin get Freeze ok?”</p><p>“Yes,” Batman said shortly.</p><p>“In that case I retract the apology for falling in, everything went fine. C’mon, let’s get dry.”</p><p>He hauled himself soggily to his feet and dripped. There didn’t seem to be an obvious route out other than climbing the crumbly, muddy bank. At least it wasn’t frozen like the bank opposite.</p><p>Batman nodded to the bank, and Red Hood decided to just go ahead and take orders. He was cold, and clawing his way up a muddy bank would be unpleasant enough without Batman being grumpier.</p><p>The bank was actually more solid than he’d feared, and he got to the top without too much effort. He turned, expecting Batman right beside him, and saw he was still halfway up.</p><p>“Getting old?” Red Hood asked.</p><p>Batman kept climbing.</p><p>Red Hood peeled off his jacket and shook it out, which didn’t make all that much difference.</p><p>“Do we have to swing back across? Because I think I lost my grapple, and hell if I’m going to hike all the way up to the bridge. It’s not that cold, you could just summon the car, eh? Ehhhh?”</p><p>Batman stood at the edge of the bank and looked across the river, then looked at Red Hood and tapped a command on his gauntlet display.</p><p>“Yes, Batcab, random street-to-cave service.” He contemplated his gear. “It’s going to be a bitch and a half to clean all this shit.”</p><p>Batman didn’t respond.</p><p>“Gargoyle impression tonight?” Red Hood tried a grin, then scowled when Batman stayed stone-faced. “Look, Grumpy McNoFun, I said sorry.”</p><p>“Hnn,” Batman hummed.</p><p>Red Hood rolled his eyes. “Fine. I’ll just wander around to keep warm, you stay there and maintain your body temperature with a secret technique only taught to those who pass the trial of the five terrible things of legend, or whatever.” He wandered along the bank, being careful to stay well back from the edge and watching his footing. He had, in fact, been rattled by his sudden fall into the river, and Bruce had probably had one-third of a heart attack. Maybe even four-ninths.</p><p>He wandered back in time for the Batmobile to pull to a stop in front of Batman, who hadn’t moved. Red Hood took shameless advantage and hopped the car, plonking himself down in the driver’s seat before Batman protested. He figured he could get away with it just then – B was always more tolerant of things that implied Jason would be sticking close, and it wasn’t like Jason was going to drive the thing anywhere but the Cave. For one thing, if he tried, Alfred could override the controls.</p><p>Batman just folded himself stiffly into the passenger seat, which Red Hood took as a sign of disapproval. He responded by chattering about dubstep, something he knew irritated Bruce deeply. Bruce didn’t stop him, or in fact respond in any way.</p><p>The Cave was full of noise when they pulled in. Robin had apparently already gotten back, and Dick was on an enforced night off. Which was to say, Dick had been lurking around in the Cave on the edge of coming out to help despite literally everyone and their dogs telling him he needed a night off after he’d passed out on a window ledge in the middle of patrol the night before. Jason hoped he’d gotten at least a nap.</p><p>Jason hopped out of the Batmobile and complained loudly enough to draw everyone’s attention as he headed to the shower. Dick made mock-sympathetic noises, Damian tisked, and Alfred shook his head with what Jason liked to think of as fond disapproval. He turned to say something to Bruce, and for the second time that night didn’t find him right behind.</p><p>Bruce was still sitting in the Batmobile.</p><p>There was a moment, when Jason had gotten it and the others hadn’t yet, and that moment contained the unpleasant contradiction of swelling dread overlain by cheerful talking. The cheerful talking died as soon as everyone followed Jason’s look.</p><p>“Bruce?” Dick asked, and then they were moving.</p><p>Alfred got there first, and Bruce was growling “I’m fine” when Dick and Damian reached him with a gurney. Bruce was still protesting when they pulled the cape and cowl off him and bundled him onto it. Jason hung back.</p><p>He couldn’t believe he’d fucking missed it. How well did he know Bruce? How many goddamn times had Bruce hidden injuries, <em>especially</em> ones he got rescuing a wayward Robin? Jason had thought Bruce was pissed at him; it hadn’t fucking occurred to him to look for another explanation.</p><p>Jason couldn’t face it. Alfred and Nightwing and Robin were there to help Batman, Jason only ever made things worse. He headed for the showers and stayed there for an hour, tuning out every noise.</p><p> </p><p>When he crept back out, only Damian was still in the Cave, typing up his report. He turned and looked at Jason, who glared back. Damian tisked and turned back to the computer.</p><p>When Jason was halfway up the stairs to the Manor entrance, Damian called “We are glad you did not drown.”</p><p>Jason yelled “Thanks” bitterly without slowing down.</p><p> </p><p>The Manor was quiet. Jason walked softly. He knew where the creaky floorboards and squeaky stairs were. There was one that creaked for him now that hadn’t before, and he’d avoided learning if it was because he was heavier now or if something had happened to the floor in that spot while he was dead and gone. He also knew how to get Bruce’s bedroom door open without making any noise. There was a trick to it. Dick had told him Bruce set that up on purpose, back when Jason was a kid, but personally he thought it was more likely Bruce just didn’t fix it.</p><p>Bruce was sitting up in bed, reading.</p><p>Jason figured he’d already abandoned both his dignity and any pretense of not caring already, so he just crawled onto the bed and curled up with his back against the side of Bruce’s legs. After a moment, he felt careful fingers start to comb though his hair.</p><p>“Ribs,” Bruce said, finally.</p><p>Jason made a skeptical noise.</p><p>“And some torn stitches. Minimal bleeding.”</p><p>Jason snorted.</p><p>“Moderate bleeding.”</p><p>Jason lay there and tried to enjoy the quiet and the hand in his hair and hated himself instead.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” he said.</p><p>“It’s not your fault.”</p><p>“I meant I was sorry I didn’t notice, which is definitely my fault, but actually yeah, it is my fault. I wasn’t looking and I could have drowned if you didn’t come in after me, because the rocks are a bitch in that part of the river and you had to rip my jacket to get me off that whatever-it-was, which I assume is when you tore your stitches.”</p><p>Bruce just repeated “It’s not your fault.”</p><p>Jason couldn’t believe him. He wouldn’t believe him.</p><p>But he could lie there and not leave. He could lie there and let his dad comfort him. He could lie there and be alive. He could lie there and make sure his dad was alive.</p><p>He rolled onto his back and wiggled down until Bruce could reach his hair more easily.</p><p>He could stay.</p>
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